This bit of humour is certainly characteristic of its author. What is its tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl; he has them so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on the "business in hand," which happens to be the opera. He finds himself actually, prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young girl will no longer disturb the reader's thoughts! She has vanished as utterly as a butterfly under a barrel of quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in the dust, but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return to his labours with a soul purified of all troubling emotions.
Another example, the famous "oesophagus" hoax in the opening paragraph of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story:
"It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God."
We scarcely need Mr. Paine's assurance that "the warm light and luxury of this paragraph are facetious. The careful reader will note that its various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird." Mark Twain's sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the contemplation of beauty, which requires an aesthetic and emotional effort, to degrade beauty and thus divert the reader's feeling for it.
To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the life of the man with an eye single to the main chance—that, one would almost say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain's humour.
